Seth Kellogg: Thrushes join in lovely, haunting concert

No other warbler can match the powerful voice of the "brook warbler," a bird officially known as the Louisiana Waterthrush. Submitted photo

The birds are flooding back to fill our greening woods with song. Most of them are small, even tiny, but they all have a melody on their minds. Some of the songs are barely whispers, like the kinglets and creepers. Others ring out loud and clear. A few are virtuosos, offering an aria that lingers long in the ears and the heart.

A brook runs through the land behind my house, dividing the upland forest from the lowland meadows and thickets. Along this brook songs seem to meet, blending into a chorus that surrounds the persistent listener. Now a new song is added almost daily.

The brook itself is singing, as the water rushes over stones, around boulders, and past banks held together by the roots of massive trees. It provides a background of steady drumming, the heartbeat of life itself. The voices of birds soar in homage to the source of all life.

Perhaps the loudest is the waterthrush, a warbler that virtually lives in the stream, the eastern songbird that is our closest counterpart to the western dipper. This species inherited a silly name, merely because the first of its species to be studied was “collected” in Louisiana.

A better name for the Louisiana Waterthrush would be “brook warbler.” Poorly named or not, this bird belts out a song loud enough to be heard above the sound of the stream. He sings three clear but slurry notes descending in pitch, then a complex jumble of notes only slightly less violent.

On a recent bird walk, 30 members of the Allen Bird Club heard a waterthrush sing over and over for many minutes. It was hard to find because the bird’s plumage is the color of bare branches. Finally one set of sharp eyes spotted it sitting on a branch, and each of us was able to study it closely through a field scope. Unlike its flighty relatives, this warbler can sit still for some time.

The bird on my stream has been steadily singing every morning for two weeks, and recently has been joined by two other brilliant songsters, the wood thrush and the hermit thrush. These are legitimately named thrushes, a family of birds not even closely related to warblers.

While the waterthrush forages and nests along the edges of the brook, the true thrushes live on the forest floor, among the leaf litter and mosses. The wood thrush prefers a habitat of mostly deciduous trees, with a few evergreens mixed in. It likes the moist forest floors of the lowlands, and one has sung a duet with the waterthrush near my stream for many springs.

Another part of this stream flows along higher banks where a solid wall of hemlocks and pines grow right to the edge. Here a second waterthrush had been singing this year, perhaps an offspring of the one downstream. A hermit thrush had been living farther up the hill for several years, but now it is heard in concert with the brook warbler, close to the stream.

Though the flutelike notes of the wood thrush are lovely, the long drawn out notes of the hermit thrush are haunting enough to fill the hearer with dreams. Heard together with the glorious trumpet call of the waterthrush, those notes can carry dreams to the gates of paradise.

If you could tear away from the songs and enter the gates, the trail would wind beneath tall pines and come to a modest marsh. It is merely an acre or two, once a home to beavers, but now a good place for songs. Weeks ago, the peepers were singing, so many and so loud that the human ear could hardly bear it.

Now the birds are returning to surround the pond with more sound and song. The blue-headed vireos love the tops of the pines and reward them with a series of rich, wavering notes. Sapsuckers provide the slow tapping that compliments the heavy drums and the clarion call of the pileated woodpecker.

That call once made the pileated the lord of this place, but this year a pair of red-shouldered hawks has set up house. The male screams over and over whenever a visitor enters its domain, a worthwhile deity to reign over all these singers in paradise.